Healthy Lunches with Style

lunch.jpgLunch is an important meal in your day, so don’t skip it — even if you are tempted to do so. Many people believe that eating a big breakfast means that lunch is unnecessary, but that’s simply not the case. When you don’t eat lunch, you are more likely to snack during the day on unhealthy foods or overeat at dinnertime.

Even worse, your body becomes depleted of nutrients when you skip lunch, so it’s better for you to always eat lunch, even if it means making a bit of extra free time available in your day. Besides, you should take a break from your writing every once in awhile if only to give your brain some time to rest.

Making a health lunch doesn’t have to take a lot of time. You can and pick up frozen diet meals from the supermarket that are ready in less than five minutes. These meals are usually low in fat and high in nutrition and come in enough varieties for you to have a different lunch every day of the year. I’m partial to Lean Cuisine’s new paninis — yum. Also Michelina’s Fettuccine Alfredo is pretty darn tasty.
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Good Nutrition May Prevent Hair Loss

hairloss.jpgOn my 40th birthday, I looked into the mirror and got the shock of my life. My hair was thinning — in a typical male pattern balding pattern, and I’m female. I can tell you, it really freaked me out. I went to the doctor straight away. After a few tests, we discovered it was just due to stress and taking some pre-natal vitamins along with working to reduce my stress started the re-growth of my hair.

But, along the journey, I learned a lot about hair loss in women. One of the most important was that healthy diet maintenance is one of the best things for hair loss prevention. Though there are certain factors influencing hair loss, maintaining regular exercise and a healthy diet will definitely bring fruitful results if you are suffering from hair loss.

Yeah, yeah, yeah — easier said than done. But if I can do it, you can too.
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Low Calorie Snacks

snacks.jpgI don’t know about you, but writer’s block gives me the munchies. But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Many people believe that eating snacks will destroy your diet, but research has found that snacks may actually help you stick to your diet. The caveat — you have to make healthy choices and don’t overeat.

Snacking can be beneficial to any weight-loss diet. For example, it can help prevent binging. By having a small nutritious snack, you can prevent overeating at your next meal. You can get a much-needed energy boost, as well as the nutrients you need from a nutritious snack during the day.

In order to have healthy and easy snacks available, plan ahead. Do your grocery shopping with healthy snacks in mind and don’t shop while you’re hungry. If you make a list and stick to it, and spend the least amount of time possible in the store, you are more likely to come home with good choices. Once you get the foods home, prepare or at least package them in handy serving size bags so they are readily available to you when the munchies hit.
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High Fiber Diets

fiber.jpgFace it, as a writer you spend a lot of your time sitting on your duff. All that sitting can have an effect on your digestive system. One way to prevent the potential negative effects is to make sure you eat right and get plenty of fiber.

Fiber is mostly polysaccharides composed of glucose units, but human digestive enzymes cannot break the bonding of these units. We can think of fiber as non-starch polysaccharides. These include cellulose, hemicellulose, pectin, and some other types of fiber. That might sound like Greek to you, but fiber is an important part of our daily diet, and a high fiber diet might be perfect for your body and digestive system health.

There are two main types of fiber, based on their solubility in water: soluble fiber and insoluble fiber. Both of these types are important for optimum health. Fiber has a number of health benefits and hence is highly recommended in daily food. Some of its health benefits are:
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The Good, The Bad, And The Truth - About Eating

pastabowl.jpgGuest Writer: Leeann Simons

It’s upsetting that so many people mentally categorize food as good or bad. “Good carbs” and “bad carbs,” “good fat” versus “bad fat.” Why does this bug me? Apparently, when you eat a “good carb,” that makes you a good person, and when you eat a “bad carb,” that makes you a bad person.

Why is the individual who eats whole grain bread better than the person who eats white bread? As a Registered Dietician, I am not crazy about hydrogenated peanut butter on white bread, but I know plenty of successful, bright, healthy people who hate natural peanut butter and love mushy white bread. And you know what? They are perfectly capable of making other healthy food choices, as well as good decisions in the other parts of their lives.

These “good” and “bad” assumptions on food choices are a total waste of our energy. When you eat the yummy Haagen Daz ice cream on a hot summer afternoon and suddenly feel like a bad person for doing so, you feel guilty. When you doubt your food choices, then you doubt the rest of the choices you make in your life. After all, if you can’t trust yourself to make good food choices, can you trust yourself at all?

Let’s stop this craziness! What about thinking of food choices as simply “healthier” or “not as healthy”? “Essential” or “nonessential”? It is a fact that it’s healthier to choose whole wheat bread over white bread, since there are more nutrients in the whole grains than in the refined flours. In reality, the TRUTH is this has nothing what-so-ever to do with the kind of person you are, your character or, (if I may use this term), “badness.” I believe that if we allow ourselves to relax, we will ultimately create a balance and most of our choices will be ones that fall into the healthy column. And, more importantly, we will also learn to trust ourselves in making good decisions in the other areas of our lives.

Becoming “at peace with food” involves a journey resulting in a new relationship with food. Instead of being marked by frustration and disappointment, by fear and competition between you and the food you eat, food will take its place as one of the many activities in your life, along with family, friends, working and being active. And, like these other activities, it should be pleasurable.

In order to become truly at peace with food, you need to learn about yourself and why you have the relationship you do with the food you eat. Like all relationships, your relationship with food took time to develop, and it will take time to change.

And that’s the truth!


Copyright (c) 2007 At Peace With Food

For additional information on becoming At Peace With Food, free healthy lifestyle tips, and access to interesting reading and nutritional links, visit www.AtPeaceWithFood.com/freetips.html

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